Babylon

An actor who can’t make the transition to sound, a Mexican on the make, a black jazz musician, an Asian lesbian and, most of all, a talented but low-class free-spirited girl, all battle hard against the rich and powerful stiffs, only to find themselves chewed up and spat out by the Dream Factory anyway. Almost none of the humour works for me, and the constantly hysterical approach overshadows any intended significance, despite dialogue explaining that significance all too clearly.

It is somewhat remarkable that this film and BLONDE (2022) came out so close together: two ambitious, complicated, flashy, hysterical and misguided movies that purport to offer some kind of reckoning with “old Hollywood” by peeling back the veneer of entertainment to expose the “dark underside of the glitz and the glamour blah blah blah”, but in both cases doing so by creating grotesque, lurid and ugly caricatures that utterly fail to hit their targets. Both movies reek of desperation born of some kind of bad conscience, desperate, that is, for approval from critics and audiences for “finally” exposing what lies behind Hollywood’s self-perpetuating myth. In both cases, audiences rejected the result.